A Stranger's House

by Bret Lott

  We stood with both car doors open, looking at the house one final time. Grady, up on the porch, his hands still on his hips, said, “We’ll have this place spotless. Tomorrow we’ll leave this place and it’ll be cleaner than it even needs to be.”

  Tom waved, said, “So how do I get in touch with you if you want to give us a hand fixing up the place?”

  Grady shrugged again, and for a moment, a flash, I saw in his movement Martin’s shrug, the hint of it somehow: the quickness, the tilt of the head, and I wondered precisely how long he’d known Martin. I wondered if that gesture were something Grady had given Martin, or if it had been the other way around.

  “I work at the Friendly’s in Florence most nights. Come on down there and we’ll talk something out.” He had a hand up and was waving now.

  “Fine,” Tom said, and climbed in.

  “Good-bye,” I said, and waved with my good hand. I started to get into the car, but saw Martin in the window behind Grady. He was waving the rag at me, smiling.

  “So long, Martin,” I said, and the rag bobbed even more furiously in the window.

  Just before the bridge back to Chesterfield was a small brown-and-white sign that read CHESTERFIELD GORGE with an arrow pointing to the right, and Tom pulled off, headed back on the old paved road. It was something he did often enough on days when we had nothing to do: just pull off, wander down any road to find what was at the end. In the early days—those days when we’d thought we were making a child, those days that seemed so long ago and so charged with anticipation, with expectation, when any sign of nausea on my part would signal some silent jubilation within both of us, until the next week or so when the blood would show up in my underpants like some sign of cancer—in those days Tom always asked if I wanted to turn down this road or that, and I always told him Yes, go ahead. It was a small ritual between us, merely something to do: ask, answer, go.

  The things we found back then, too, amazed us. Once, up on the Mohawk Trail, we’d turned off and found Shelburne Falls, a town with magnificent waterfalls and the Bridge of Flowers, a bridge of concrete arches over the water and set about with flowering plants. The bridge was something both of us had heard about all our lives, but which we had never seen, and that particular day, a bright day in April, we felt as if the bridge and waterfalls had never existed before the moment we rolled down into town, drove along the main street, stopped and looked at the arches over the water.

  Another turn another day had taken us to an old covered bridge, the road we’d turned onto dead-ending there. Huge boulders had been rolled onto the roadway at both ends of the bridge, signs posted warning that the bridge was unsafe for cars. We parked, walked across it, stopping to watch through gaps between planks the water pass beneath us and weave its way around the rocks down there.

  These were our discoveries, places and things we felt were our own, and what had made these findings more our own had been that asking by Tom, his never assuming we could turn off, and my never saying no, an unspoken agreement between us.

  Then the first time we had gone out for a drive after the doctor had told us we would have no children, Tom had simply turned off without asking. We were out beyond the Quabbin Reservoir, and he had slowed down, turned right onto an unnamed asphalt road, and driven on. I said nothing.

  The Wednesday before, Tom and I had gone to the doctor’s for what the doctor had called “an important consultation.” We had sat in his office in Northampton, the office plush and warm, a lighted globe in one corner, the walls covered with dark oak paneling, book-shelves crammed with impressive books, everything from Plato to Dickens to Plath.

  This was long after insurance had stopped paying for our trying to have children, long after we had had to pay for Tom’s semen analyses, for the fertility drugs, for the laparoscopy I’d had and the hysterosalpingogram we’d had done at the same time, the dye injected into my uterus leading up through blind alleys and into dead ends. This Important Consultation, too, was after eight consecutive months of artificial insemination there in the doctor’s office, my feet in cold metal stirrups, Tom’s semen applied by the doctor. On those days when my temperature crept up almost imperceptibly I could not have felt farther away from my husband, his semen on the end of a surgical tool, Tom in another room, waiting. The last three times I had cried while in the chair, my legs spread for the doctor, for conception; cried while looking up at the acoustic ceiling, at the cold room, at fluorescent lights. I had cried, but we wanted a child, wanted to make our own so badly that we’d nearly finished off the money we’d saved waiting those four years. Our money was nearly gone, money we’d saved in order to have a start.

  The doctor positioned himself in his leather chair, placed his hands on top of the desk, the same hands, I remember thinking, with which he tried to force my body to conceive. He laced the fingers together, smiled, and explained how there was no reason he could pinpoint, that we might as well stop trying, that adoption was always an option.

  Adoption. Adoption was something we’d talked about long enough, not seriously at first, but as we neared this endpoint in our lives, a point we both pretended would not come, the idea figured larger and larger in our minds. But at the same time our money was disappearing. Who knew how much money adoption would take? Who knew how many years of our lives the process would eat up?

  And the child would not have been created by us. I knew how small this made us seem; enough children needed parents who would give them the love we had to give. But our own child was what we wanted, a child in whose body coursed blood part mine, part Tom’s. If we could not have that, we wanted nothing. My parents were dead, and I had no brothers or sisters. My family would end with me. Tom had only one brother, a man seventeen years older than himself, a lawyer living in Lowell and working for Wang, a man from whom we received Christmas cards, and nothing else. Tom’s parents, too, were dead, ancient, he had told me enough times, even when he was born, parents too old and too tired of their own lives to give him much more than an allowance and a place to eat and sleep, his brother already out of college and married by the time Tom could begin to remember things. At stake for both of us were our lives. There was no one left beyond the two of us.

  The doctor, seeing no reaction from us to what I knew he thought were kindly words, smiled again, unlaced his fingers, and put his hands out to his sides. He shrugged, smiling.

  Tom, seated next to me on the leather couch, slowly took off his glasses and brought from his back pocket a handkerchief. He started to clean his glasses, this time his movement, the swirling of the cloth on the lenses, unsure and slow. If his hand with the hand-kerchief had paused a moment, I felt certain I would have seen the fingers shake with some fear, something dying in him right there in the doctor’s office.

  He hadn’t looked at me or the doctor, his eyes instead on something outside the window, though I knew he saw nothing out there, only blurred shapes. Then he stood, walked around the sofa, and left the room. He hadn’t put his glasses back on.

  I could feel my tears already coming as the doctor and I both stood. He’d put his hand out to me, said he was sorry, but I did nothing, only walked out, the door closing silently behind me.

  The next Saturday was the first day he pulled off without asking me, and after a few minutes of following the nameless road through trees, I could see off in the distance a huge abandoned barn, boards broken out, bushes waist high all around. Unlike the barn in Chesterfield, this one sat next to the road, behind it a huge field of nothing, only more brush. The barn looked as if it would fall down right then, tumble with the small push of wind created by any passing car.

  But the roof, you could see, was still strong, still sturdy. It was made of slate, and as we approached the barn I could make out a design in the shingles. In the center of the field of gray was a large diamond of tan slate; inside that diamond was another of red slate, and finally, in the red diamond was an even smaller one, this one of the same dark gray. The three diamonds seemed to floa
t on the gray slate roof, each one perfectly shaped, no shingles missing anywhere. Someone had built that roof right, I remember thinking. Someone had worked hard enough and meticulously enough to make a roof that would stand forever, if only the foundation—the barn itself—didn’t fall.

  Tom slowed down as we neared the barn, stopped the car when we were next to it. He got out.

  I stayed in the car and watched as he made his way through the brush to the barn entrance. Once there he looked up into the rafters, into the darkness, the black wood. Above the doorway was an old hex sign, the round painting only faded reds and yellows and blues.

  He was looking up, his back to me. He had on a red sport shirt, and his khakis, and a brown belt. I watched him, and then his shoulders began to heave, to shake with crying, his lifeless hands quivering at his sides, his head back.

  I opened my door, and went to him. I pushed back bushes and weeds, felt them scratch against my bare legs, but I made it to him, and I put my arms around his waist from behind, locked my hands together in front of him. He lifted his hands to mine, and we both cried, my face pressed to his back.

  A few minutes later I looked up over his shoulder to see what it was he had looked at. Of course there was nothing up there, only the darkened peaks of a dead barn. More than enough.

  Since then he had never asked if he could pull out onto an unknown road, but only did it. We still drove, still made discoveries, but the air was no longer filled with the joy of waiting. We drove, but I knew that that ritual having died was not any sort of deterioration of our love, of our marriage. It was only a settling in, a shifting of earth to more stable circumstances, the inexorable progress of love.

  We drove along the road toward Chesterfield Gorge and past the dirt parking lot for the recreation area. We kept moving, the road becoming rougher and rougher, passing homes here and there, more old stone fences, the road shrouded with trees, open to a meadow to the right or left, shrouded again. Then we came out on another meadow, and Tom stopped the car, left the engine running.

  He turned to me, the keys dangling from the ignition, the sun slanting down into the car and catching the metal pieces so that they reflected light into my eyes. I put my hand up to block the light, moved my head an inch or so, and the light was gone.

  He said, “We really need to talk. Because I think I want that place.”

  I put my hands in my lap. The bandaged one seemed paler, and I thought of Martin watching me, me watching him.

  I said, “Will it come furnished with Grady and Martin?”

  “Optional equipment,” he said. “But I wouldn’t mind their help, if they really want to give it. We’ll pay them a little money, have them help clear the lot around the house, maybe help with some painting or something.” He was looking at my hands now, too, just staring.

  “I love the extra room up there,” I said. “It’s perfect. It’ll be my room for whatever it is I want.” I paused a moment, and for no reason at all, just because it was what I was thinking of and because I wanted to hear my voice in the car, I said, “You know, that would have been the room for one of—”

  “Don’t,” Tom cut in, and reached up a hand, not to strike me, but, I imagined, to fend off words. He held his hand in midair, then let it drop, let it hit the hard, blue plastic of the console between our seats. “Don’t,” he said again. “Why did you say that? Why did you have to say that?” He was quiet, and slowly he moved both hands to the steering wheel, held on. “You only know,” he said, “that that’s what I’m thinking. What we’re both thinking of. Don’t you go around thinking you’re the only one of us who thinks about that.”

  “I was just talking out loud,” I said. I tried to move the fingers of the bad hand, the very tips barely waving in slow motion. “Just words.”

  He looked up at me quickly, ready to say something to me. I knew it would be about words, about their nature, their ability to do more than any single act a man or woman could think of. He had given me that talk before; words were what he worked with, what he knew. He knew they lied, too, more than anything else, and for me to say Just words was a lie, because they were not only words, but something else. A life we would not know, human beings we would not create. Our house, that one behind us at the base of the hill where at this moment worked a boy and a retarded man, would, in the end, only have the two of us, and would only be filled with the words between us. Just us two.

  He closed his eyes, took a long breath.

  He looked at me. He said, “But the house?” and we were, I hoped, beyond the moment, beyond the lie of my words.

  I leaned over to him. I put my arms around his neck, and said, “I already told you.” I closed my eyes, remembered the view from my room. I lay my head on his chest, felt his chin touch the top of my head. I said, “I can see us there.”

  OCTOBER

  We sat in the no-smoking section, but in a restaurant this small, the Friendly’s Grady told us he worked at, that distinction didn’t really matter: there were only three banks of booths running lengthwise, the room only some fifty feet deep. Smoke from other tables would find us.

  Tom leaned toward me, said, “He told me when we were out there that he didn’t know why. But all I’m doing is asking. That’s all. And I’m just trying to find out if he really wants to work out there with us.” He paused. “I just don’t know if I trust him or not.”

  I said nothing. We’d had this conversation too many times, Tom wondering out loud exactly why the owner, Mr. Clark, was getting rid of the place. We could get no straight answer. Clark, just as Grady had said, was living in Maplewood Home, a rest home just outside of town on Route 9. It was a big old place, ugly yellow with turrets and spires and dormers and screened porches, a place that had at one time, we were told, been the home of the onion baron of the Pioneer Valley back in the 1890s. But now it housed only old folks, and was a private place, as private as you could get and still be minutes from town. Though the house was set only a few yards back from the street, it was surrounded with black wrought-iron fences and had a security guardhouse at the base of the driveway. The guardhouse, merely a shack painted the same color as the house, was manned day and night. So far, we hadn’t been able to speak with Clark; all communications had been through Rita and the owner’s lawyer, a Mr. Blaisdell. The lawyer had virtually guaranteed there was no structural damage. We were buying the house as is.

  I looked around, wondering if Grady were even working tonight. We’d come right over from work, Tom still in his tie, me still smelling of rabbit. But then I always did.

  “Who are we going to trust?” I said. “We can’t get a word out of Clark. Or Blaisdell. Grady’s the only one who knows anything about the place. I trust him.”

  He leaned even closer. Still I wasn’t looking at him, but at the cook station, at the metal door back into the dishwashing room, at the cash register. He said, “You don’t even know him. You don’t.”

  The metal door swung open, and there stood Martin, his hair still slicked back, his eyebrows straining high above his eyes. He had on the blue-checked polyester shirt the men here wore, the little name plate with the red Dymo sticker on it pinned to his chest. He was carrying a plastic bin filled with plates, his lips parted, teeth clenched. Quickly he walked from the doorway to behind the wood panels that hid the cook station and ice cream freezers, his head above the panels. All I could see was his profile, his high forehead, the sweat that glistened there. He made it to the end of the freezers, disappeared below the panels, and I heard the bin of plates slide into a cupboard of some sort back there, heard the bin hit the back wall with a metallic thud. His head popped up above the panels, and he weaved his way back between waiters and waitresses, pushed the metal door open, and disappeared back into the steam and bright lights and kitchen sounds.

  I turned to Tom. His eyes were still on the door. I said, “Did you—”

  “Yes,” he said without letting me finish. He turned to me. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, really.”
He put one hand on the tabletop, drew an imaginary circle, tapped the center of it.

  I looked back to the door, and remembered once more him staring at my hand. Without looking I touched the spot where the dressing had been a month before, felt the little raised slits of flesh, felt, I imagined, the red color of that scar. Touching the skin made it almost tickle, and I stopped, flexed the fingers. Though they were still tight, the flesh between thumb and forefinger a little tender, they were limber enough to begin surgery the next day, and I thought of putting Chesterfield, soft, white Chesterfield, into the Gormezano box, placing him on the surgery table, lining up the stereotaxic frame, and the work that would begin. I swallowed, caught a breath, because it was just as it had always been: a mistake to have named the first rabbit.

  Rabbit running had been canceled until I came back the Tuesday after I’d been bitten. I’d needed the extra day, that Monday, just to sit in the empty apartment, Tom at work. I needed to sit and watch television and read magazines and sleep.

  Tuesday morning, though, I had gotten right back to business. I wanted to go in there and do what I had to do, not let any fear settle in me. But Will and Sandra and Paige and Wendy insisted on asking me again and again how I was. I only smiled as best I could, afraid to tell them I just wanted to be left alone, to do my work. To get these rabbits run.

  Finally I went down to the basement, closed my eyes a moment, and pushed open the heavy door into the Green Room.

  There sat Chesterfield at his cage door, his nose going again, ears straight up.

  My eyes next went to Large #2’s former cage, where a new rabbit sat. Mr. Gadsen had already been in to cover himself.

  I crossed the room, and saw atop the cages a brand new pair of canvas gloves. I picked them up, the material stiff and white and coarse. Pinned to the left glove was a scrap of old notebook paper torn from a three-ring binder. On the piece of paper was written: